Dungeons 2 Review

Underwhelming Overworld

one half of it is bad. Any time a game attempts to split its attention between two entirely different modes, it runs the risk of having one side drag the other down. In this case, the entirely competent dungeon mode of Dungeons 2 is tied to a poorly made real-time strategy anchor and thrown out to sea, with no chance to swim home.

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In theory, this is idea was clever! Moving into the endgame of a Dungeon Keeper-like management game has never been satisfying, so replacing it with an RTS battle might’ve been a good payoff--thematically appropriate too, as it connects the idea of an underground evil corrupting a totally different surface. The central idea of Dungeons 2 is a good one. As a personification of Ultimate Evil, you’re playing a Dungeon Keeper-like strategy game belowground — indirectly controlling your creatures to build rooms for efficiency, sending little imps out to find caves and gold, managing entertainment for bored creatures —all this stuff works. When you’ve got a decent little army, you send them above the ground, where it’s a conventional real-time strategy game in the Warcraft vein: direct control over troops, right-click to move and attack, and so on.

And it feels like playing Warcraft...the first one, from 1994. There’s no major strategic element--you just find enemies and smash them. Nor is there’s a significant tactical component. Things like attack-while-moving, or formations? Not present. A few units have skills, like upgraded orcs who can buff nearby units with a Battle Cry, But you’ll have to wrestle with the interface to get to them. There are hotkeys for the special skills, it turns out, but Dungeons 2 never makes this clear.

Obfuscation of important information, or poor explanation, is a consistent problem throughout Dungeons 2. It tells you what you need to do (often, and annoyingly, during the campaign) but rarely how you might go about doing it using the confusing interface. For example, on one campaign map, you have a mission to build an arena and train a unit with it. I did this, and consistently dropped my units on the new fighting pit. He or she would sit there, whack the training dummy for a while, gaining experience...and the narrator would continue to tell me I needed to train units. It turned out that by “train,” Dungeons 2 meant a much more specific use of the Arena: I had to drop the unit onto the pit, then click on the Arena and select a unit upgrade. That would get the narrator off my back… half an hour later. That was simply the most egregious example — far too much of my time was spent trying to figure out how to navigate three or more levels of maps, or why, despite clicking the “attack” button that appeared over an enemy trap, my troops were simply standing there and letting it kill them.

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Yet even once I learned Dungeons 2’s interface quirks, I found that its two-mode structure prevents its stronger management game from being any fun. Because all of the significant conflicts occur in the RTS overworld, this means that a huge section of any Dungeon Keeper-like game — dungeon defense — is utterly perfunctory. Occasionally a handful of enemy soldiers will pop in to keep you honest, but a handful of traps is usually enough to wipe them out. Since the dungeon is essentially a safe place all game — and since you will acquire hands-off resurrection tech for your troops — nothing stops you from just sitting for hours until you have the perfect army, then bashing through everything in the overworld.

Meanwhile, spell casting and research (an essential part of the genre) exists in Dungeons 2, but since most of the spells only work in your own territory, away from all the conflict that might require them, they’re rendered essentially useless. In the end, each Dungeons 2 map’s middle and endgame consists of little more than “get big army, right-click on giant army’s target” over and over.

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So it’s up to the story to save Dungeons 2 from being a forgettable exercise… but it can’t. It’s focused on you, the Ultimate Evil, attempting to regain power and crush all the good heroes who’d defeated you in the tutorial mission. This is fairly standard stuff within the dungeon-management genre, but it’s told almost entirely through the voice of an incredibly chatty narrator. The overall tone is supposed to be a genial British storybook narrator gone evil, and it succeeds in small doses. But the narrator never shuts up. Whatever charm he might have quickly disappears after yet another passive-aggressive demand to do the next mission in the quest log, regardless of your circumstances.

Verdict

It’s a shame Dungeons 2’s above-ground RTS battles are so primitive and poor, because the underground dungeon-management stuff actually works fairly well. It’s nothing new or special — another would-be Dungeon Keeper successor — but that’s not the worst idea in the world. Dungeons 2 could have been a nice, if uninspired, Dungeon Keeper clone, but it reaches to do more than that, trips, and falls flat on its face.

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